2025: MORE OF THE SAME? (ZOOM)

2025: MORE OF THE SAME? (ZOOM)

How should we react to the news that Elon Musk is unhappy with the present executive committee running British capitalism? Musk is apparently also unhappy with Reform Party leader Nigel Farage and wants to see him replaced.

We’re reminded of the saw that life is a tragedy to those who feel and a comedy to those who think. Unfortunately, capitalism is, for the majority, no joke.

A Doge was the term used to refer, during the Renaissance to an elected head of Italian city states. Elon Musk is tasked by Donald Trump to run a non-federal executive Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE. The two things are probably unrelated but under capitalism extreme wealth equals extreme power and Musk certainly appears to be intent on having his fingers in many pies.

‘Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has continued to spar online with the top British leadership, suggesting Washington should become involved and “liberate” the Brits from their supposedly “tyrannical government.”

The billionaire conducted a poll on the idea on Monday on his social media platform X, asking users whether “America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government.” The proposal got a positive reception, with nearly 59% of respondents backing it. More than 1.4 million people voted on the issue in less than 12 hours.

The apparent regime-change suggestion comes amid a continuing attack launched last week by the US-based billionaire against the top British leadership. Musk has targeted British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, accusing him of failing to tackle the grooming-gangs issue and to properly investigate numerous assaults on underage girls at the time the incumbent PM headed the UK’s Crown Prosecution Service, from 2008 to 2013.’

Quelle surprise Rodney, the rich are getting richer. Who would have Eve’d it?

Bees and honey might not guarantee happiness but at the levels noted below it underpins a lot of power. How long until someone shills for them by saying they deserve it because they work hard, not everyone could do it, blah, blah, blah.

Wealth the minority accrues comes from the exploitation of the majority. Does the majority want a truly equal society or not? The answer is in the positive. There’s a lot of expensive advertising (propaganda) issuing every day to persuade everyone that no other type of society is better than the one they have.

‘Last year witnessed an unprecedented surge in the wealth of the world’s richest individuals. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, the combined net worth of the world’s 500 top earners reached $10 trillion for the first time on record in 2024.

The total value of the fortunes tracked by the index stood at $9.8 trillion on Monday, December 30, down slightly from a December 11 peak of $10.1 trillion. This figure is similar in size to the combined GDPs of Germany, Japan, and Australia, according to data from the World Bank.

According to the index, the most significant gains came from tech titans, including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jensen Huang. The ten top earners list also includes Oracle founder Larry Ellison, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell, and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The eight jointly gained more than $600 billion this year, 43% of the $1.5 trillion increase among the 500 richest people tracked by the index.

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Musk was the biggest gainer in 2024. He saw his fortune more than double from the beginning of the year, reaching $442.1 billion. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Meta Platforms, also saw substantial gains. His net worth rose to $219 billion, positioning him among the top three wealthiest individuals globally. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, whose stock nearly tripled in 2024, saw his wealth rise $76 billion, which placed him among the top gainers of the year.

Most of the world’s top earners benefited from the US stock market rally, Bloomberg noted. The S&P 500 Index gained 24% through the end of the year, and the ‘Magnificent 7’, which includes Apple, Meta, Amazon, Alphabet, Tesla, Microsoft, and Nvidia, accounted for more than half of the benchmark’s performance. Trump’s election victory also had a positive effect on those on Bloomberg’s index, boosting both stocks and digital assets. Combined, the 500 listed billionaires gained $505 billion in the five weeks following the election, or a third of their total for the year.

The ten top earners list has only two representatives from industries other than tech: The founder of the LVMH luxury brand, Bernard Arnault, and Berkshire Hathaway investment guru Warren Buffett.’

Many writers have, through the ages, posited their views of what the future might hold. Some are more successful than others, some miss the mark completely.

Wikipedia describes of Jeffrey David Sachs as ‘an American economist and public policy analyst, a professor at Columbia University, former director of The Earth Institute. He worked on the topics of sustainable development and economic development.’

In a book published in 2005, twenty years ago, Sachs wrote: ‘This book is about ending poverty in our time. I am not predicting what will happen, only explaining what can happen. Currently, more than eight million people around the world die each year because they are too poor to stay alive. Our generation can choose to end that extreme poverty by the year 2025.’

The book, The End of Poverty: How We Can Make It Happen in Our Lifetime, was reviewed in the Socialist Standard, September 2005.

‘There are various things wrong with this book, the first being the title. Sachs (described on the back cover as ‘probably the most important economist in the world’) is not concerned with doing away with sink estates where children do not get one square meal a day, let alone three, or the culture of pawn shops and loan sharks (which would be classified as relative poverty). Instead he is writing about eliminating absolute or extreme poverty, where households cannot meet basic needs: people are chronically hungry, have no access to health care or safe water, and may lack rudimentary shelter. In 2001, around 1.1 billion of the earth’s population were in extreme poverty. Sachs neatly places things in perspective:

  “Almost three thousand people died needlessly and tragically at the World Trade Center on September 11; ten thousand Africans die needlessly and tragically every single day – and have died every single day since September 11 – of AIDS, TB, and malaria.”

But even if his proposals were implemented and proved successful, there would still be plenty of poverty in the world.

Ending extreme poverty would of course be very worthwhile, but can capitalism achieve this? Sachs claims that the number of people living in extreme poverty has fallen from 1.5 billion since 1981 (largely due to developments in China). Surely, however, we are entitled to be a little sceptical about such claims: they are based on World Bank estimates, and ignore the extent of poverty still found in China, especially in the countryside. He acknowledges, though, that the extreme poor in Africa have more than doubled in the twenty years to 2001, now being over 300 million, which is a rise even in percentage terms. Yet, he argues, extreme poverty can be got rid of by 2025: the key is ‘to enable the poorest of the poor to get their foot on the ladder of development.’ The way to kick-start things is by comparatively modest amounts of overseas aid, which will mean that households can save more and so increase the amount of seeds and agricultural equipment they have access to and will also allow governments to build roads, sanitation systems and so on; this will snowball and lead on to further development. The first few chapters of the book imply that Sachs has some kind of economic magic wand that he can wave over countries from Bolivia to India, delivering prosperity.

However, his proposals for ‘ending poverty’ are effectively put forward in a vacuum, unencumbered by the existence of a world dominated by one super-powerful nation, a small number of super-powerful companies, and a tiny minority of super-rich capitalists. Sachs accepts that exploitation of poor countries by the rich has happened in the past, but believes that it no longer applies. He also accepts, though without making it explicit of course, a division of the world into owners of the means of production and non-owners. Doing away with this would mean an immediate end to all kinds of poverty – extreme, moderate and relative – without having to wait another twenty years and rely on yet more empty promises.’

Paul Bennett

https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2020/09/stories-for-boys-2005.html

 Labour are in trouble for not delivering ‘growth’. But given that the planet is being consumed and the climate turned upside down by ever-increasing growth, why doesn’t political success lie with ‘no-growth’ policies?

Because capitalism needs ‘growth’ to deliver profit for that small percentage who own most of the planet’s wealth. Yet scientific research shows we can already produce enough to provide a comfortable living standard for everyone on the planet without overburdening the world’s ecosystem. 

But this could only be implemented within a system of common ownership and democratic control of the world’s resources with production geared to meet needs not profit. As the futurologist William Gibson said: ‘The future is already here. It’s just not being evenly distributed.’

https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/

Editorial – The change of rulers in Syria

Pathfinders – The next big thing

Hobson’s choice

Cooking the Books 1 – A fuss about NICs

Halo Halo / Tiny tips

Material World – Will capitalism implode?

Big Tech and the state

How we live and how we might live (part 5)

What is socialism?

Fake socialism

John Prescott: a Labour man through and through

Cooking the Books 2 – Einstein got it right

Film Review – Miracle on 34th Street (1947)

Proper Gander – The latest celebrity to be accused

Book reviews – Hannah, Corbyn/McCluskey, Saini

50 Years Ago – The fat of the land

Action Replay – Make sport great again?

January 2025 events

Party news

Life and Times – A letter to my son

 Capitalism would rather waste resources on wars than provide roofs over the heads of its populace.

It’s reported that ‘The number of homeless people in the United States has reached a record level since the federal government began tracking the figures in 2007. According to data released this week, almost three quarters of a million people, 771,000 are homeless in America, an increase of 18% compared to 2023, marking the sharpest annual rise in decades.

The figure published by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) on Friday translates to approximately 23 out of every 10,000 people in the US. The increase follows a 12% rise in 2023, which the department attributed to skyrocketing rents and to the conclusion of pandemic assistance.

A severe lack of affordable housing nationwide is being compounded by “rising inflation, stagnating wages among middle- and lower-income households, and the persisting effects of systemic racism,” natural disasters, and an influx of migrants without access to stable housing, according to the HUD statement.

Median rent was up 20% in January 2024 from rent costs for the same month three years earlier, the National Low Income Housing Coalition wrote in March.

According to the HUD, there has been a 39% increase this year in the number of individuals in families with children who depended on shelters or slept outside. This amounts to approximately 259,000 people, the highest figure recorded since data collection began.

The report also shows that nearly 150,000 children were homeless on the targeted January night, a 33% increase from the previous year’s count. Meanwhile, the number of veterans experiencing homelessness declined by 8% from 2023.

The new homelessness figures come amid the Biden administration’s pledge to increase funding for affordable housing and expand services aimed at preventing homelessness. However, advocacy groups argue that more systemic reforms are needed, such as stronger tenant protections, rent controls, and a focus on mental health and addiction services.

The US Supreme Court ruled in June that cities may ban homeless residents from sleeping outside; more than 100 jurisdictions around the country have since taken steps in that direction, Associated Press writes.’

From the January 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘I’ve hated Christmas for as long as I can remember. Since the day when, as a child, I realised that I’d been conned every year of my short life by stories about Father Christmas only bringing toys to good children — a sort of “no-strike” agreement in return for a Christmas bonus between me and my mother. Later I realised that all of Christmas is a con — from the birth of Jesus which it is supposed to be celebrating, to the “peace and goodwill” that is supposed to appear miraculously at this time of year.

Nowadays I get a sinking feeling in my stomach when Christmas cards first go on sale in the shops (usually sometime around the end of summer); I start to feel decidedly fed up by about mid-November when fairy lights and tinsel are festooned around concrete street lamps in the High Street; and by December, depression hits with a vengeance and I can be found loitering in travel agents frantically seeking out cheap holidays to places where they don’t celebrate Christmas.

Last year I succeeded: I flew to Israel on Christmas Day — not a turkey, mince pie or tinsel angel in sight (so long as you kept well away from Bethlehem where they tend to get a bit excited about it all). The irony of it was that in order to pay for this extravagant piece of escapism I had to work every night for two weeks at the post office — sorting Christmas cards!

But despite my loathing of the enforced jollity of Christmas I always used to like New Year. I liked the idea of seeing the Old Year out and starting the New Year afresh with fine-sounding resolutions scribbled furtively in a diary which, if I kept them, were sure to make me healthy, happy and wise, or so I thought. Of course I never did keep them, or at least not for very long.

As idealism faded and cynicism set in even the resolutions took on a more jaundiced tone: to stop killing myself by smoking cigarettes (that one, kept for over four years, is lately getting a bit frayed around the edges); not to be so bad-tempered, and so on. I also began to realise that I could make all sorts of resolutions but I was fighting against enormous odds in trying to keep them (besides, that is. my own lack of will power).

The society in which we live makes it almost impossible for most of us to be healthy, happy, or wise, no matter how hard we try or how many New Year resolutions we make. How can we become more healthy when the environment in which we live is profoundly unhealthy? I might resolve to swim twenty lengths of the swimming pool every day and only eat whole foods, but that’s not going to do me much good if I live next to a leaky nuclear reactor, or in a city where the air is polluted by lead-ridden exhaust fumes. I might resolve to give up smoking (again), but if I smoke to help me cope with the stress of everyday life caused by anxieties about money, work, housing or bills, then I might very well get a stomach ulcer instead. My resolve to be less bad-tempered is all very well, but if the reason I get bad-tempered is the daily frustration of not being fully in control of my own life then I am attacking the symptom and not the cause. How nice a person can you afford to be in a world that is not nice, where competition and aggression are highly valued attributes? And how can people become wise when they are constantly being fed misinformation, distortions of the truth and downright lies from the relatively harmless fairy tales about Father Christmas coming down chimneys to bring toys to good children to the infinitely more harmful fairy tales of politicians who tell us that if we, the workers, are good (work harder for less pay, don’t go on strike, don’t make a fuss about poor housing, health care and so on), then we will reap the benefit as “the nation” gets richer.

The truth of the matter is that, as individuals, we are extremely limited in our ability to change our own lives very much at all. We are part of a society which directly affects what we can or cannot expect from life, how we live our lives and even the way in which we behave towards each other. So if we want to be healthy, happy, caring individuals — if, in other words, we want to be fully human — we must first live in a society which permits those qualities to flourish. And capitalism, the society in which we all live now, certainly does not.

Capitalism is a system of society which divides people rather than unites them — capitalist from worker, men from women, blacks from whites, nation from nation. It teaches us competition not co-operation competition for jobs, housing and something that approximates to a bearable standard of living. The division between capitalist and worker is inherent in capitalism — their interests are totally opposed and can never be reconciled. But the divisions between workers are not inherent —they are encouraged by the conditions in which we live and work but could be overcome through a recognition of our common class interests, our mutual inter-dependence and, above all, the need for radical change.

So this year, when your self-image has recovered from the body-blow dealt it by your brother thinking you were the kind of person who would like the pair of pink lurex socks, or by your Auntie Flo being convinced that a Barbara Cartland novel was just what you always wanted; when you’ve been to Marks and Sparks to get a refund on a jumper in order to pay the electricity bill; when the last of the turkey has been metamorphosed into turkey curry; when you’ve replied “Quiet, but nice” for the last time to people who ask at work if you’ve had a nice Christmas; when the TV has stopped showing disaster movies, The Sound of Music and Jimmy Savile tormenting sick children in hospital; when the ankle you sprained leaping across the living room on Christmas Day to turn off the Queen has recovered; in short, when life has returned to humdrum normality, why not reflect on what your New Year’s resolution will be this year? Are you going to make pious resolutions to become a “better” person, which you have very little chance of keeping, or are you going to make this the year you start to take control of your own life? It would be nice to think that people throughout the world are scribbling the words: “I resolve that 1986 will be the year that I will organise democratically with my fellow workers to abolish capitalism and bring about a society in which we can all start to become healthy, happy and wise.”’

Janie Percy-Smith